I'm half white. I'm all too aware that I have to be pretty diligent about monitoring my own thoughts for possible racist influence. If I don't actively fight it and actively monitor my own thoughts, it seems to slip out when I don't expect it.
I'm also half Asian. I see evidence of internalized racism in Asians and other races, whether directed at other minority races or directed at one's self or own group. Asian-Americans can buy into anti-Asian bullshit and also buy into anti-black or anti-Latino bullshit. The classic example of this is studies showing that African-American jurors are more likely to vote to convict if the defendant is African-American than if the defendant is white. Obviously, very few African-Americans would consciously make racist choices, so how do these things happen?
Logic Chains
You start with a premise. You apply an argument to the premise. If the logic of your argument is good and the premise true, then your conclusion is supported by the argument. If the logic or the premise is off, then your conclusion is not supported by the argument. Once you have a conclusion that you accept, you can use that conclusion as one of the premises for another argument supporting another conclusion.
People understand that logic chains work going forward. Once you accept the Germ Theory of Disease, you can use that as a premise for other conclusions that help protect people from disease. However, most people do not follow these logic chains backward.
Is it reasonable to support a conclusion with evidence? There exist logical proofs for this. I like to bring this up because many people are surprised to find out that proofs for such a thing exist. For most of us, no one ever explicitly told us that it is reasonable to support a conclusion with evidence, yet most of us accept this as true. This is because as participants in this culture, we accepted a lot of other arguments and conclusions that have "It is reasonable to support conclusions with evidence" as a premise if you trace the logic chain backward and go far enough. We were not told this explicitly, but we accept it as true because we accepted other things that have this as an underlying premise. No one explicitly told us that this is true, no one ever discusses this premise, no one ever discusses the fact that we accept this as true, and yet most of us accept "it is reasonable to support conclusions with evidence" as true. Because we accept this as true, this conclusion/premise affects what other arguments and conclusions we will accept.
There is no such thing as a subconscious according to research, but I think "hidden" underlying premises can have an influence over the decisions we make and the conclusions we accept without our conscious knowledge.
Premises and Culture
If you ever talk to missionaries, you learn how their work, well, works. The goal is to alter an entire culture to make it easier for the members of that culture to accept the truth claims of a particular religion.
Christian missionaries found that they had more success with converting indigenous Americans to Christianity if they first convinced them to treat women and homosexuals worse. Culture is a series of premises that are almost never discussed openly by the members of that culture, and if you can alter those premises, you can profoundly alter the decisions made by the participants in that culture.
Speaking a language also entails accepting a series of unspoken premises, but I don't think that is relevant here.
Cultural Premises and White Fragility
Simply because we were raised in this culture, we have accepted a large number of premises that are never openly discussed. I think this is one of the reasons for white fragility. You have all these assumptions that underly your thought process, but you don't openly discuss them and might not even be aware of what those premises are.
Thus, if someone makes an argument that challenges one of those premises, you're going to feel uneasy without being able to put your finger on why an idea or argument is upsetting you.
When physicists discuss the beginning of the universe, they mean the beginning of spacetime. This makes it difficult for some people to talk about the origin of the universe. What does it even mean to lack space and time? Does it make sense to talk about "before the universe" if time didn't exist yet? This is difficult for us to even talk about because words like "exist" and "yet" contain assumptions that time already exists. Thus, when we talk about the origins of the universe and get to the part where we're talking about not-space or not-time, people can become agitated, uneasy, or even defensive because assumptions they didn't realize they were making have been challenged.
I think something similar happens with white fragility. As participants in this culture, we probably all accept certain underlying racist assumptions without realizing it. In order to discuss racism at all, we have to challenge those "hidden" assumptions that many of us don't realize we are making.
It's not just that white people can become agitated and defensive when discussing anti-black racism; Asian-Americans can also become agitated and defensive when discussing anti-black or anti-Latino racism. It's not that Asian-Americans consciously indulge in racist ideas. Any Asian-American familiar with Japanese-American history or Chinese-American history knows all too well how quickly and easily the white majority can turn on us, and how awful things can get when this happens. Chinese-Americans are rediscovering this as Republicans fan the flames of anti-Chinese prejudice in order to deflect blame from Trump's coronavirus response. Since most white people can't tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc., many Asian-Americans are experiencing the effects of this increase in anti-Chinese hatred even if we are not ourselves Chinese.
Not An Excuse… I Hope
Please note that I am not at all making excuses for racism. I'm not saying that it's all society's fault and that therefore we should not hold white people accountable for anti-black racism. I'm certainly not arguing that we should not hold Asian-Americans accountable for anti-black racism.
I'm just trying to understand why I have to keep fighting my own thoughts to be a less awful person, and I'm trying to understand why self-directed internalized racism exists.
If I'm right about how this internalized racism works, then that would be one possible explanation for why it happens and why it's so hard to get society to stop doing these awful things. After all, we have to constantly fight against and monitor our own thoughts to prevent succumbing to cognitive biases, so regardless of the explanation for internalized racist ideas, we should expect the need to constantly examine our own thoughts for cultural biases as well as cognitive biases, and we should expect cultural biases to be every bit as insidious as cognitive biases.
Confirmation bias is insidious and we have to constantly fight against it because there is no neon warning sign that alerts you to the fact that you are about to reject a piece of supporting evidence just because it conflicts with a conclusion you already have.
I am not rejecting nor excusing personal racism, but if racism is also a property of culture as well as individuals, then it should come as no surprise that we have to constantly monitor our own thoughts to be on the guard against racial biases the same way we have to constantly be on the guard against confirmation bias.
In the wake of the Civil Rights era, most white Americans finally accepted that racism is wrong, and the vast majority of whites insist that they are not racist, and yet evidence of racism and systemic racism still plagues us. Simply "deciding to not be racist" (as Ibram X Kendi points out, what does "not racist" even mean?) is clearly not enough. I see anti-black racism among not just whites, but Asians and Latinos as well. I see anti-Asian sentiments in whites, but also African-Americans. There are racist activists for women's rights and misogynist activists for black rights. I find it hard to believe that so many people are consciously choosing to be racist when so many of those expressing racist ideas are themselves negatively affected by some kind of bigotry or another. I don't want to let people off the hook, particularly in light of the fact that it seems we have to actively monitor our own thoughts to overcome this, but I also want to understand why it is so persistent and so pervasive despite the fact that nearly everyone is in agreement that it is wrong.